About ten years ago, I re-visited the house in Lancashire (UK) where we had lived as a family in 1987 while I was teaching at Stonyhurst College.  I was accompanied by my daughter, who had been only six years old for most of the time we lived there.  As soon as we got out of the car, her first comment was “there is that aroma again – and there is that sound too”.  She was referring to the smell of damp leaves and the gurgling of the small creek that ran along the edge of our yard.  Her second comment was “everything here is so much smaller than I remember” – her recollection of the small, rural, single-lane roadway beside our house was more like being a wide expressway.

I find it interesting that similar experiences can retrieve identical thoughts and memories in spite of long time gaps.

A similar incident occurred for me this week as I began unpacking our boxes of belongings that had arrived from Hong Kong in our new home in Houston.  The memory that flashed into my mind was one simple thought repeated from when I was unpacking everything in Hong Kong just over seven years ago – “Never again!”.

Unpacking books is perhaps the least pleasant aspect of moving homes, especially when it involves a library as large as mine.  This move to Houston has become a bit complicated because it has involved bringing books and clothes from Hong Kong, and furniture from Australia.  Although everything was supposed to arrive at about the same time (i.e. this week),

and our things from Hong Kong did arrive on schedule this week, we have learned that the shipment of goods from Australia has been delayed by two months.  Our things have not left Australia yet, and they won’t do so for another week, meaning that the expected date of arrival is now mid-October – quite a long time to wait for our bed, chairs, most of the bookcases, and so on.

Having said that, most aspects of arriving in Houston have been overwhelmingly positive.  We keep meeting lovely, hospitable people, and I have now managed through sometimes arduous efforts to arrange our electricity, gas, water, phone and internet.  We even managed to find a good bed to use until ours arrives in October.

The hot, sunny weather and clear blue skies remind us both of the best Sydney summers.  Di and I are really enjoying Houston, even if we do sometimes wish that our furniture could get here and that those boxes might magically unpack themselves.